There is No Mother Nature—There is No Balance of Nature: Culture, Ecology and Conservation
@article{Jelinski2005ThereIN, title={There is No Mother Nature—There is No Balance of Nature: Culture, Ecology and Conservation}, author={Dennis E. Jelinski}, journal={Human Ecology}, year={2005}, volume={33}, pages={271-288} }
Postmodern philosophy asserts there are only socially constructed narratives and "situated knowledge" that serve for all forms of explanation (Smith, 1989). Narratives, by definition, have a narrator who picks and chooses the constraints: essentially the who, what, when, where and why in a story. Narrators as storytellers then employ these constraints as the structural entities, the so-called "facts" (Allen et al., 2001), to make events into static things. In other words, the narrative is meant…
38 Citations
Reviewing the relationship between neoliberal societies and nature: implications of the industrialized dominant social paradigm for a sustainable future
- EconomicsEcology and Society
- 2022
. How a society relates to nature is shaped by the dominant social paradigm (DSP): a society’s collective view on social, economic, political, and environmental issues. The characteristics of the DSP…
Balance of Nature and Animal Rights
- Philosophy
- 2015
RationaleThe elementary consideration of the notion of balance of nature is a state of affair where interactions between different organisms and their environment produce a steady and balanced…
Political Ecology: Nonequilibrium Science and Nature‐Society Research
- Economics
- 2012
Political ecology has emerged as an interdisciplinary space where concepts from the physical and social sciences are utilized to understand nature-society relationships. In this paper, we explore how…
Evolving Views on the Nature of Nature
- Education
- 2018
This chapter presents the theoretical framework that guided our study of the intended, enacted, and received science curricula on ecology and environmental science topics in the US education system.…
Population regulation and the life history studies of LaMont Cole.
- ArtHistory and philosophy of the life sciences
- 2007
LaMont Cole's popular writings and lectures, which consumed his later career, extend his scholarly portrayal of natural populations as tending toward stable and homoeostatic equilibrium, with the goal of drawing contrasts with the deviance of rapid human population growth.
Towards a Critical Re-Appraisal of Ecology Education: Scheduling an Educational Intervention to Revisit the ‘Balance of Nature’ Metaphor
- Education
- 2011
The ‘Balance of Nature’ metaphor is a pervasive idea in ecology. However, the scientific community acknowledged during the last decades that equilibrium conditions are rare, while disturbance events…
Commons management and ecotourism: Ethnographic evidence from the Amazon
- Economics
- 2009
The paper evaluates the relationship between ecotourism and commons management. Social and economic impacts of ecotourism in an indigenous village in the Peruvian Amazon are considered in relation to…
Students’ Reasoning about the Future of Disturbed or Protected Ecosystems & the Idea of the ‘Balance of Nature’
- Environmental Science
- 2012
This paper is part of a larger study that aims at highlighting students’ interpretations of the idea of the ‘Balance of Nature’, as well as its use in their reasoning about the future of an…
Framing Two Environmental Flow Trials in the Murray-Darling Basin, South-Eastern Australia
- Environmental ScienceWater
- 2022
We make sense of the world around us through mental knowledge structures called ‘frames’. Frames, and the metaphors that help to form and maintain them, can be studied through examining discourse. In…
The pursuit of the 'good forest' in Kenya, c.1890-1963 : the history of the contested development of state forestry within a colonial settler state
- History
- 2016
This is a study of the creation and evolution of state forestry within colonial Kenya in social, economic, and political terms. Spanning Kenya’s entire colonial period, it offers a chronological…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 54 REFERENCES
Are You Man Enough, Big and Bad Enough? Ecofeminism and Wolf Eradication in the USA
- Sociology
- 1995
There is much to be gained and little to be lost by understanding and articulating our thinking about who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are. In this regard, the usual pattern of labeling, judging, and acting…
Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas
- Environmental Science
- 1977
Preface Part I. Two Road Diverged: Ecology in the Eighteenth Century: 1. Science in Arcadia 2. The empire of reason Part II. The Subversive Science: Thoreau's Romantic Ecology: 3. A naturalist in…
Nature and morality from George Perkins Marsh to the millennium
- Art
- 2000
Abstract This essay is a revised version of the first Journal of Historical Geography lecture, delivered by the author in 1998 at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the…
Assumptions about Ecological Scale and Nature Knowing Best Hiding in Environmental Decisions
- Environmental Science
- 2002
Assumptions about nature are embedded in people's preferences for environmental policy and management. The people we interviewed justified preservationist policies using four assumptions about nature…
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
- Art
- 1998
In this groundbreaking new book, one of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for what he calls consilience, the composition…
Changing Concepts of the Balance of Nature
- Environmental ScienceThe Quarterly Review of Biology
- 1973
Balance-of-nature concepts apparently have receded in importance with the rise of ecological specialization, probably because ecologists have developed more precise concepts of productivity and ecosystem can serve about the same explanatory functions.
The Nature of Shifting Cultivation: Stories of Harmony, Degradation, and Redemption
- Political Science
- 2002
Shifting cultivation is identified as a major cause of tropical deforestation. Sources that recount such impacts routinely employ an Eden-lost narrative structure that represents shifting cultivators…
The reintroduction and reinterpretation of the wild
- Sociology
- 2000
This paper is concerned with changing social representations of the “wild,” in particular wild animals. We argue that within a contemporary Western context the old agricultural perception of wild…
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
- Education
- 1968
Charles Darwin's seminal formulation of the theory of evolution, "On the Origin of Species" continues to be as controversial today as when it was first published. This "Penguin Classics" edition…